US Department of State — Country Reports on Terrorism 2017: Kuwait

Overview: 'Despite continued efforts by ISIS to target Kuwait, there were no terrorist incidents in its territory in 2017.' Kuwait launched imam training, school outreach and a youth television channel as part of its National Plan to Reinforce Moderation; in July the Higher Authority for Communication created a Directorate for Cybersecurity tasked, among other things, with 'fighting violent extremism'. 'There were no substantial changes in counterterrorism legislation since 2016.'

Trials: in June 2017 the Court of Cassation issued appeal verdicts for the 26 defendants in the August 2015 weapons-cache case (commonly known as the Abdali cell case), commuting one of two death sentences, increasing sentences on 19 defendants and upholding the remaining acquittals; in August, after speculation that 16 of the 19 had escaped to Iran, the authorities announced their re-arrest. An Egyptian national received a life sentence for the 2016 attack on US service members, and the Court of Cassation upheld sentences on three ISIS members, including the group's leader in Kuwait. In October the Appeals Court refused UN-designated financier Jaber al-Jalahmah's petition to unfreeze his assets.

Terrorist financing: Kuwait presided over MENAFATF in 2017; its Financial Intelligence Unit joined the Egmont Group in July 2017; in October Kuwait joined the United States and GCC states in 13 designations of individuals and entities affiliated with AQAP and ISIS-Yemen, the first joint action under the TFTC; its National Risk Assessment was finalised with World Bank assistance at the end of 2017. 'The Central Bank of Kuwait implemented a "same business-day" turnaround policy for implementing new UN terrorist financing-related sanctions, which has proven difficult for local bank compliance departments to achieve.'

USE IN A REPORT: the official record of the 2017 terrorism trials, including the Abdali case at cassation, and of the supervisory milestones in Kuwait's counter-terrorist-financing framework.

For compliance and financial-crime specialists: this chapter dates three milestones commonly relied on in enhanced due diligence — Egmont Group membership (July 2017), the first TFTC joint designations (October 2017) and the National Risk Assessment (end-2017) — and records the practical strain of the Central Bank's same-day sanctions-implementation rule on banks. Those milestones should be read with the later FATF evaluation and grey-listing on this Dossier, which assessed effectiveness rather than framework. For criminal-law practitioners: the report gives the cassation outcome in the Abdali case and the re-arrest of defendants reported to have fled to Iran.